


Turn and Turnabout

by BannedBloodOranges



Category: Treasure Island (1972), Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: Background Relationships, Background Slash, F/M, Falling In Love, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Pregnancy, Rarepair, Romance, Running Away Together (sorta), Sappiest Thing I've Written, Sappy Ending, Time Skips, references to past relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-21 09:54:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14913182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BannedBloodOranges/pseuds/BannedBloodOranges
Summary: The night they became lovers the sky seemed to fall.





	Turn and Turnabout

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the 1972 film, where Mrs Silver is a young wife. 
> 
> This got away from me like wow. Rarepairs unite! (I ship this like burning, I apologise. It got sappier and sappier.)
> 
> I own nothing. Non profit fun only.

_I lie in your charms_   
_Though it harms the best of me_   
_And I lie on to my friends to them_   
_No wonder why I wait for thee_

 

_And I hope like a child_   
_Widow of the sea_   
_I hold these arms around you_   
_All's around me_

 

_(_ Ben Howard, _Under the Same Sun)_

 

* * *

 

The world changed too fast, but in some places, it never changed at all. Bristol Harbour was dark with grey skies and the rain spitting down like tears, agitating the ocean and rolling the high sweet salt smell of the sea into the streets. The doors were shut off from the weather like clams, and everything about it was cold, and yet, Jim pondered how the world had stood still. The weather was different – as a boy, it had been the cheap sunshine with the blustering English summer – but the Spy Glass Inn stood the same as he stared through the spyglass itself, hung and swinging from the grog shop sign.

Now, he no longer needed to step on tiptoe to see through it. He could hold up one hand and knock it off if he so desired. Eight years the world had changed, had grown him up, but the dull wood door was cracked with the same cracks, the window was dank in the same light, and after eight years Master Hawkins looked into the inn that carried a memory, a memory that had driven him out of his touring ship that morning when they came into port to rest, and as curious a man as he had been a boy, he turned that same handle and stepped inside.

* * *

 

 

She would know him if he came in as a cripple with patched clothes and wielding wild gunfire. She would know him if he brought in half the tide. A gentleman he be, a gentleman unlike the usual mugs in here. He was young still, although in her memory he was always that boy, the boy that who stared open eyed into her stirring bowl, hungry as a shark and as innocent as a lamb, and she knew her John was a bad lot, for the boy would come back maimed or worse, but that be none of her business, so she had sealed her lips and stirred harder, letting the boy take a double helping of her pastries.

The boy knew her too, for he looked at her too quick, lip dangling open. He had survived, and John had not, but that was to be suspected. She looked back at him, too hard and too long, and he turned away finally, sitting down on an empty bench, and she cursed the place for being lonely of people, for there was nought by her and him and the rain on the leaking roof.

Alibe wasn’t stirring now, although she wished now she could be, for something to occupy her aching hands. She wiped down the counters instead, feeling the bruise of her dagger strapped inside her thigh, beneath the bundle of her ale-soaked skirts.

“What can I get you?” The language was still alien. Although she knew it by now, it still upset on her tongue and each word pulled on her patience. The boy man jumped and looked over at her. His skin was flushed against his lace and cotton. As a boy, she could tolerate him. As a man, her throat filled with dislike.

“Mrs Silver?” He said clearly, although there was a stammer in his tone. “I – I am looking for a room for the night.”

“Aye.” She leant back against the barrels. “That I can do.”

“Thank you.” He murmured, crawling further into himself under her glare, but there seemed to be no malice in him, not that she could see, and marriage to a known now dead pirate was hardly hangable (although there were those who needed little excuse to take to death a woman like her, so it be.)

She served him drink as the sky above rumbled like galleons in the waves.

* * *

 

 

Jim drank his thin ale, looking out of the windows to the tumbling spray, and about him, Mrs Silver worked. No moment with her was idle. She had been a young wife to Silver, and as a boy, he had thought little of her, except that he had rarely seen any woman of her ilk, for he had only seen black sailor men pass through the Benbow Inn as a boy.  But now, upon facing her, he found her to be beautiful, unchanged from the years, although a stronger stride and a heavy look belied her experience.

“Did he ever come back?” The question hung in the air, finally birthed, like the breaking of an awkward peel. Mrs Silver put down her ladle.

“No.” She replied.

“Why?” He asked, feeling again like a boy.

“Because he died.” She rose, hitching her skirts as she did so. “The shipmates said he drowned. Sunk.”

There were no more questions. Jim finished his drink and took the key Mrs Silver handed to him. He wondered if they really were married, or whether she was the missus in name only.

He’d only known her as Silver, an extension of that formidable seafaring man.

“Forgive me, Mrs Silver,” He hooked the heavy key into his palm. “I do not know your full title.”

“My full title?” She dared half a smile. “And why would some gentlemen want to know my name?”

“Out of respect, Mrs.” Jim took off his hat, and half bowed to her, for he wondered if she had been promised gold once upon a time, only to be left with an Inn without a cook.

“Alibe.” She replied, blunt, and turned away from him.

* * *

 

 

Jim stayed that night, and the night after, and the night after that. He stayed until the storm had passed and his business in Bristol was long completed. The room was tiny but clean, filled with the jeers from below and the scent of ale and Alibe’s fresh cooking. Jim paid handsomely in advance and slipped in and out of his room without sight from the old salts that filled the benches and drank Alibe’s ale.

“You could be in finer quarters then this,” she said as Jim sat in her empty bar, nursing brandy. “You are a gentleman, Jim.”

 Jim attended to his business with the aging squire, took his delicate meals in rooms stuffed with flowers and fine china, and returned to the inn come sundown.

The use of his given name shook him to his bones, but he smiled at her over his drink, and shook his head.

“I prefer it here,” he said quietly.

“You won’t find him ‘ere.” Alibe leant across the counter to him, and he saw her skin glimmer beneath the lanterns, streaked with the sweat of the inn.

“I know.”

“Then why are you looking?”

“That I don’t know,” He answered, and that was honest.

 

* * *

 

The night they became lovers the sky seemed to fall. Rain piled up between the cobbles and flooded the lower towns. The sea was angry, lashing salt water whips against the broad grey sands. The Inn was rocked in the turnabout winds and through the rusted latches Jim heard the swirl and break of the screaming air, as if the very world was coming apart.

He finally rose, dressed in his breeches and loose nightshirt, and with a blanket around his shoulders, took himself downstairs. The Inn was dark, the lanterns out, the thunder illuminating the empty benches and kitchens. Earlier, Jim had sat above this every room with the growing gales outside, listening to Alibe’s laughter and song rise through the floor, and he had stilled his quill and listened.

As old Silver had done not so long ago, Jim sat beside the window, looking out amongst the cobble streets.

“He would sit there, ye know.” Alibe was behind the counter in night dress and shawl. Her head scarf was missing. Black twisted braids were scooped high above her proud skull, her hooped earrings hanging low to her neck. “You sit there, and I wonder.”

“He saved my life.” Looking at her was becoming difficult. Jim resumed staring out of the window, swallowing hard, and he knew she had had seen, for her eyebrows rose. “He saved my life, but took the lives of my friends, and betrayed us all. But on the voyage, he was so kind to me.”

“Aye,” She said. “He could be kind.”

“I didn’t know a man could be like him.”

“Many men have many ways about them. Some kind, mostly cruel.”

“Did you love him?”

She stared long at him.

“He wanted someone for the looking after.”

“Alibe …”

He rarely used her name. To use it now made his heart beat hard. The wind turned. Turn and turnabout.

“He loved me in his way,” She said. “And I cared for him back in whatever way I could.”

“He used to call your darling.”

“Darlin’,” she corrected, and she sounded just like him. “He would parrot that, and think I did not understand what he spoke, but I knew what he said, and what he meant. And I knew that, I knew _him_. I was young when he had me for his wife, but I was no fool.”

“I saw Black Dog, and chased him, and you chased me back.” Jim tamely smiled. “You were rough with me and dragged me back, and he called you Darlin’ then, and…”

 “You’ve got the wrong man, Darlin,” she parroted, and Jim’s neck prickled.

“I was eleven years old.”

“And what are you now?”

“Nearly twenty.”

“Aye.” She dropped her shawl. “I was twenty-two summers when he took me for his wife, and twenty-six when he took to sea, and no trace did I see of him then.”

“Sunk.” Jim whispered dimly.

“Sunk.” She repeated, and to him she went, hot drinks in hand.

They sat like that, calmly together, and Jim thought of the absence of Silver and that terrible parrot, and he realised how they had faded, for in the warm dark spaces of the inn, they were no longer to be found. Instead, Alibe. Thirty-four years behind her, eight years a widow, who had claimed the home and hearth for herself, and here it was, hers.

“My mother owned an Inn.”

“Did she now? Single woman?”

“Yes. My father died. She raised me alone. The ol’ Benbow Inn.” He gestured with his hand, as if spelling it out in the dark before him. “Long gone now. It lived and died with Mama.”

“Billy Bones,” Alibe drained her cup. “Beware the one-legged man.”

“Yes.” Jim laughed softly. “My mother hunted his pockets after he died, to get back the rent he owned, and the tab he never kept.”

“A wise woman,” Alibe declared, and with her spare hand, moved the hair from Jim’s eyes. It was a barely a whisper of touch, but Jim leant into it, laying his cheek in her palm. “But did she have a wise son?”

The distance between them closed, and hot breath warmed their lips, and Jim kissed her, and her him, and they felt the rise and fall of each other’s heartbeats, and outside the storm rolled to a halt.

 

* * *

 

Alibe hadn’t thought of her frustrations, be it a delicate way of putting it, but young Hawkins had taken to her such a way that she had sorely missed, for old husbands and bitter salts did little for physical company, or the pleasures of the poor, as ol’ Silver had claimed it to be the _educated_ way of saying it. But Jim was young, fourteen years her own senior, and upon him he carried an unwise romanticism and an energy, for everything she was and everything they did.

He wore less of his lace and uniform and sat with the sailors sharing his stories. He rose early in the mornings and accompanied her to market, carrying barrels of ale and sacksful of flour. He met with merchant men who spoke of sea and silks, and beside her he would walk and ask her advice. In the evenings he rolled up his shirtsleeves and kept to the kitchen, and she could see how Long John had trained him, for he was skilled with a skillet.

The milky look of the lone gentlemen faded to the high, bronzed cheeks of the outside sailor, and now he grinned wide and happy, and looked upon her with twinkling eyes, and maybe it was youth or stupidity on his part, surely, but in her it spilled a painful ache, a fear and joy she had not felt since her own childhood, before the men had come to her islands and stolen her (family, friends, _everything_.)

The months passed, and she expected for the bloom to die, him to come upon a dainty thing to marry, a female pale and laced and speaking one tongue as smooth as butter. But whilst he still took tea with the squire, and paid her most handsome for the room, the months became a year and still he warmed her bed and _her_.

But the coming months brought greater truths. Her bleeding did not come. She lifted her bed sheets to the light and searched for the tell-tale stains. But no blood came, and a few weeks after, she woke with her head reeling. Dashing from the bed to the chamber pot, she crouched naked and vomited.

The sheets stirred, and she felt Jim’s hands on her shoulders, rubbing slow and worried.

Her stomach clenched, the world rolled, and she vomited again.

An hour later, she lay in bed, Jim beside her and the two of them bare and open. It was a Sunday and the church bells chimed in the distance. Jim’s thumb rubbed soothing circles on her shoulder. Her head rested heavy on his chest. The chimes sounded lonely and strange, as if the world had turned over in a single night. Turn and turnabout.

“Do you know what it means when a woman bleeds not?” She murmured low against his chest. “And when morning comes, she is sick?”

Jim kissed the bow of her hair.

“I’m with child.” She sat up, searching his face. “A few weeks gone, I think.”

Jim observed her silently.

“You think I will abandon you?”

“Would you?” She sounded hard. But life had made her hard, and if Jim wanted her, he had to see that. To take it all in, each fray and crack and shatter. “A gentleman, Jim? To have a black mistress and her half child?”

It was a challenge. But in the roar of it, there was despair. It pricked through her words and attacked her eyes.

Jim sat fully. He stared at her, lips tight.

“I love you.” He professed. “I love you. I love you and I love our child.  I have stayed for love, I have stayed for you, and…” He swallowed hard, like he did, that night with the storm and the kiss. He slipped from his finger a gold ring, the only finery he carried, the only hint of the wealth he kept hidden, the last whisper of Silver’s ambitions. Onto her black hand he put it, and there it shone. “You are _not_ my mistress. I want you for my wife, if you would allow me, and if not, then I just want you, always.”

For what seemed like an age, she appraised him. Instinctively, their hands sought each other’s.

“You are not a wise man,” she whispered, then she laughed, soft and fraught, and she kissed him, and he back, his hands settling on her belly. “But an unwise man needs a wise wife.”

 

* * *

 

The marriage was a quiet affair, a signing of papers with Dr Livesey as witness. He was an old man now, and partial to the ways of pirates and sailors, and said little. The squire, uninvited, heard of the rumours that Jim had taken the Missus of Old Long John as his bride, and soundly withdrew all commissions. Jim gladly left it, took his pregnant wife abroad his ship, and sailed for places where water logged cobbles and stretches of grey sands were nevermore.  It pained Jim to leave the Spyglass, so he bought it and rented it out to others and let its narrow passages and low hung ceilings keep the old stories of Captain Flint and treasure. He wondered if Alibe felt anything as Bristol vanished on the horizon, that old town that carried the memory of old inns and first husbands.

_I loved him in my way._

Dr Livesey kept vigil at her bedside, monitoring the child, for he had come abroad with no prompt, his belongings packed up and his assets dissolved. With him was another man, younger then himself, who Jim saw sharing the Doctor’s quarters. He asked no questions.

As they neared the borders of their new home, barely another day’s sail, Alibe stood on the deck and watched the mound of land swell on the horizon. Her hair was loose about her face. The clothes she wore were richer, colours of sunflowers. Her bump was proud, straining against her skirts. She was beautiful.

“He will be strong,” She said, gratified. “I can feel it.”

The sun was warm. Jim looked up at the beam of the blue sky, the pearl whites of cloud carrying on from each other.

“He’ll be loved.” He answered her, and in the turnabout winds, they sailed for home.

 

 


End file.
